Tag: Bournemouth

It was first against third in the table in League Two this weekend, as Rochdale made the long journey south to play AFC Bournemouth. It was a match that was fired up by comments made by the Rochdale manager during the week, and Dale had the last laugh with a convincing win.

AFC Bournemouth overcame a seventeen point deduction to stay in League Two but, as Mark Murphy writes, their problems didn’t finish there. It could be argued that the greatest condemnation of the Football League’s “Fit and Proper Person” test was that Ken Bates could pass it. This, however, may no longer be the case – not because of anything Bates himself has done, but because of the serial mismanagement of AFC Bournemouth’s affairs last season – which has emerged from the Football League’s explanation for maintaining the strictest possible transfer embargo on the South Coast club. Current Bournemouth chairman Eddie Mitchell issued a statement three days after meeting league officials at their Preston HQ this week to discuss the embargo’s future. While Notts County can add the equivalent of a small country’s Gross Domestic Product to their salary bill apparently without breaching League Two’s salary cap, Bournemouth cannot currently even loan a player from another club. Football League regulations allow these two contrasting circumstances to apply, despite what is supposed to be a ‘level playing field’ because of the mismanagement skills of gentlemen called Alastair Saverimutto and Paul Baker. Sol Campbell’s £40,000-per-week keeps Notts’ salary bill below 60% of turnover because their new owners, Middle East consortium Munto Finance, are paying Campbell’s wages outside of the club’s actual turnover, even though the financiers behind Munto are yet to be...

The new League Two season has started with everybody financially stable – more or less – but Lincoln City supporter Keith Duncombe doesn’t feel that the authorities are going far enough. In 2002 Lincoln City FC nearly closed down. In fact, the club was 24 hours from having its application to enter administration in court considered when two of the then Board got together to try to secure enough funding to make that a reasonable possibility. One re-mortgaged his house; the other pledged a not inconsiderable sum of money. I shall be eternally grateful to them that they made these selfless gestures, as it ensured the survival of the club that I have followed all my life, and that has had fans from three generations of my family on the terraces and in the stands cheering on the “Mighty Imps” since the 1920s. But it was touch and go, and I know several fellow fans that travelled to Birmingham for the court hearing and who thought at the time that we just wouldn’t make it. The fans played their part too, and not just those who supported the Imps. I spent many a long hour on the net at work persuading, cajoling and plain begging fans of other clubs to buy a seat (for £10) at Sincil Bank as part of the “Sponsor a Seat” initiative that eventually raised...

It’s not what we’d want, this points deduction business, but it is making the bottom of League Two very interesting indeed. There is a definite feeling that, having seen the points deductions handed out to AFC Bournemouth, Rotherham United and Luton Town, many other participants in that particular division decided that they fancied a year off. The trouble with this theory is that the clubs at the bottom of the table have made a reasonably good job of catching up. Rotherham United managed to get their heads above water in October and have crawled above Grimsby Town. Bournemouth got to zero with a 3-3 draw at Luton last Tuesday, and Luton themselves are only seven points away from what has become a mystical figure at the foot of League Two this season. Chester City are in the pack of clubs that have been looking nervously over their shoulders for the last two weeks, but the suspicion is that they have more pressing concerns than this season’s relegation battle to worry about. The supporters of the club are in a state of something approaching a state of civil war over the activities of the Supporters Trust (two members of the Trust Board there have recently resigned), while the club’s owner, Steve Vaughan, has recently put the club up for sale. Crowds have dropped to an average of under 2,000, with...

Back in the day, struggling Fourth Division clubs had to regularly undergo the annual ordeal of re-election, in which the bottom four clubs in the table along with any non-league clubs that would fancied their chances took part in a vote to retain league membership. It is often said that the voting was seldom an objective affair. One story goes that Gateshead FC charged visiting club dignitaries for drinks in the boardroom, and were ejected from the Football League by the other clubs when they finished third from bottom in 1960. The flipside to this was at Hartlepool United, where the hospitality was so lavish that they never needed to worry about losing their membership. We thought that this had been done away with in 1987, when meritocracy seemed to have been brought in with automatic promotion and relegation between the Fourth Division and the Conference. Two decades on, however, the nagging feeling is starting to take hold that this meritocracy is all so much smoke and mirrors and that, in fact, the League’s members are acting as selfishly as ever. This may seem like a harsh assessment, but the thirty point deduction given to Luton Town earlier in the summer gave the impression of being almost vindictive in its severity. This has been followed up this week with the League’s decision to dock Rotherham United seventeen points for...